CU will provide assistance to faculty members to help qualify for home mortgages

Business Report Correspondent

BOULDER ? The University of Colorado is budgeting $11 million over the next six years to loan to incoming faculty members who will use the money to help finance home mortgages.

CU officials view the housing-assistance program as a recruiting tool to attract and retain the “best and brightest” at the university’s four campuses, and they will present the plan to the board of regents on March 15.

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Judith Van Gorden, treasurer of CU and associate vice president for budget and finance, said she and three others are developing a detailed plan to present to the regents. The group includes Todd Gleeson, vice chancellor of faculty affairs; Jim Barlow, chief financial officer of the CU Foundation; and David Chadwick, manager of the real estate department at the foundation.

CU Chancellor Richard Byyny said one half of CU’s faculty lives outside the city limits because of Boulder’s high cost of living. The median price of a single-family home in Boulder as of December 2000 was $451,900, according to the Boulder County assessor’s office.

The average annual salary of CU faculty members was $68,003 in 2000, according to records posted on the university’s Web site. Salaries varied from college to college, with music faculty members averaging $50,787, at the low end, to law school faculty members being the highest paid averaging $108,772 a year.

Van Gorden said CU President Betsy Hoffman and Byyny agree on the need for the program. “The housing-assistance program is intended to be systemwide at all four campuses. The plan is to complement the private-loan market and be a partnership program for all loans,” Van Gorden said. The CU foundation will determine the interest rate, she said, but that formula has not yet been released.

It is not a grant program, and it will target incoming faculty members. The objective is to be ready by June to accommodate the first wave of new faculty members who will start teaching this fall, Van Gorden said.

The university will be responsible for the application and selection process, and the foundation will provide the capital and administrative support. The foundation will receive $100,000 annually from the University Initiatives Fund to run the program.

The initial scope of the program is six years with a total of $11 million to attract and retain 220 individuals. According to Van Gorden, this year, the first year of the program, $1 million or $50,000 each for 20 new faculty members, will be budgeted. Next year, and every year for the next five years, $2 million is planned to attract and retain 40 faculty members annually.

Todd Gleeson, a muscle-biology professor in addition to his work in the chancellor’s office, said the Boulder campus hires about 60 to 70 tenure-track faculty members and about 50 non-tenured faculty members every year. “We have about 1,100 now, and that doesn’t include researchers,” he said. Research faculty members are supported by grants and not by the state.

Gleeson said CU’s attrition rate was 1.8 percent last year or about 20 faculty members lost. “It’s been between 2 percent and 2.3 percent over the last decade. It rose to 4 percent for the handful of years we were in political turmoil because of a controversial president,” he said.

Gleeson initiated the idea of a housing-assistance program for CU and gives credit to Van Gorden for helping him get it rolling. “It didn’t take any great insight,” he said. “The universities on the East Coast have had a program like this for a decade.

“We have to compete with universities like Michigan and Stanford, yet it doesn’t cost as much to live in Ann Arbor as it does Boulder. Implementing a housing assistance program is analogous to a corporation offering incentives to hire the best people,” Gleeson said.

Barlow and Chadwick will implement the program for the CU foundation on the project. Chadwick researched what other universities are doing and met with officials from Stanford University . CU has modeled certain features of its housing-assistance program after Stanford’s.

In one or two years, the program will be evaluated to determine what is working and what needs improvement, Barlow said. “It’s not hard and fast. We probably didn’t think of everything.” He said the selection process is a numeric system that objectively chooses faculty members eligible for housing assistance.

In addition to the foursome preparing the plan for the regents approval in March, Gleeson said an oversight committee is being appointed to certify the selection process. The committee consists of three members: Rich Bakemeier, head of the faculty council, and two officers from the president’s office, yet to be named. “They will make sure the process is being carried out,” he said.

“We’re on a fast track to get this done,” Van Gorden said. “The housing-assistance program will benefit faculty, help the foundation and add value to the community.”